Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Daily Archives: December 5, 2018

CCP was a bit quicker here in December in getting out the monthly economic report November. However, in their haste it looked like they had omitted almost all of the charts I usually write about. Frustrated by that, I decided to just grab the raw data this time around and make my own damn charts, only to find that all the charts I expected were included in that .zip archive.

So I have already learned something new this month. I’ll check that off my list.

As usual, I will start off with the mining to see how peace in the south and small scale conflicts in the north are doing.

November 2018 – Mining Value by Region

In a completely expected turn of events, Delve continues to be the region seeing the most mining activity. The bar chart shows just how far ahead Delve is when compared to other regions.

November 2018 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

By this measure the mining output of Delve is greater than the next seven regions combined. (The newly returned Fade region is at the bottom of that list as well as others, perhaps confirming the theory that it was missed last month due to not hitting some minimal activity threshold.)

And yet the Delve number is down. In October the amount mined was measured in excess of 19 trillion ISK, but for November it is down to 15.5 trillion ISK. Did people get tired of mining in Delve?

Maybe not. As usual, there is another chart here to figure into things.

November 2018 – Economic Indices

As you can see, the price of minerals has continued its post-war slide, landing at a three year low in November. Since the mining amount is measured by the value of the ore, falling prices can mean falling numbers even if the total cubic meters of ore mined remains the same.

November 2018 – Economic Indices over All Time

As for the price of minerals, while they are not at an all time low, they are headed there. I think we are firmly in the zone where, if you have a researched Charon freighter blueprint, you can build the freighter, insure it, have somebody gank it, and still turn a profit. That was a tale I was told at the bottom of the last mineral price dip and we’re now well below that.

So mineral prices seem like something CCP needs to address. Maybe. There is a production aspect to that.

November 2018 – Production Values by Region

In production, while The Forge region was up a bit (as was its feeder region The Citadel, while Lonetrek held steady), Delve continues to be the single region with the greatest production output.

November 2018 – Production Values by Region – Bar Graph

Production, of course, requires inputs, of which mined minerals are a significant portion. Aryth said on a recent Meta Show that production in Delve enjoyed a certain advantage in that the ore and minerals were available at a discount when compared to the Jita market.

There is a not insignificant cost to ship compressed or and minerals all the way to Jita in order to sell. That makes what I would call the effective parity price of minerals in Delve lower, and since Delve is producing all that ore for the engines of production to consume, Delve’s economic power might be causing a greater dip in the economic indices for minerals than one might see in Jita.

Anecdotally, tritanium seems to be cheaper in 1DQ1-A than in Jita, but I cannot tell how much weight to give that observation.

And since we’re here, I might as well through the sales charts up on the page.

November 2018 – Trade Value by Region

For all the pride of the Delve region, Jita and The Forge remain the economic center of New Eden.

November 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph

That chart is so lopsided that CCP has to exclude The Forge in order to get some insight into other regions.

November 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph, Forge Excluded

Domain, home of Amarr, remains in second place with Delve not too far behind. But you have to get down to seventh spot, which is Esoteria, the home of TEST, before another null sec region shows up.

NPC bounties are more straightforward.

November 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region

No we’re back to things Delve dominates and which do not depend on variations in market prices in order to measure. NPC bounties are a direct faucet into the economy. On that Delve was down by half a trillion ISK.

In the north of null sec, where infighting around Branch and Venal is keeping everyone busy while the Imperium’s Space Violence squad is active and the NGSA is trying to oppress the numbers in Geminate, Deklein is the highest earner for ratting, bringing in just over 2 trillion ISK in bounties.

Overall bounties continued to peak.

November 2018 – Top Sinks and Faucets

While mineral prices are at a recent low, NPC bounty payouts are now at an all time high. The question remains as to what CCP will do, if anything, and if there is anything they can do that Malcanis won’t make a mockery of.

Overall, bounties are down slightly as a percentage of the income faucet total, ringing in at 63%. The number was 65% in October.

November 2018 – Sinks and Faucets and the ISK supply

But that is because other faucets like incursion payouts and agent mission rewards and bonuses were also up for November. The overall money supply was up another 37 trillion ISK for the month.

So there it is, another month and the economy of New Eden hasn’t fallen over yet. Aspects of it look bad, but it keeps on chugging along.

Finally, the chart that I choose to end with most months, the overview and comparison of regions.

November 2018 – Regional Stats

And so it goes until next month. You can find all of the raw data and charts over at the dev blog post for the November report.

As I often do, I focused a lot on the anchor and left the filler aside.

After swapping back and forth over the course of the week I settled on Ralph for my main anchor. I was with him on Monday 1x Ralph, 1x Creed II, 1x Bohemian Rhapsody, and 5x The Favorite.

Later in the week I was less sure and experimenting, ending up with 1x Ralph and 7x Widows.

I wish I could say that was a well thought out pick, but in reality it was something I was tinkering with and copied over to think about at some point on Thursday. And then I forgot about it until about an hour after the leagues all locked and I was stuck with that.

I did think that Widows could possibly have a shot at best performer, though I honestly should have kept to six screens of it given how much of my budget was left over. And Widows did end up as the second best price performer, but a silver medal counts for naught in the scores.

Instead, come the Saturday morning estimates The Possession of Hannah Grace was way up the charts relative to its FML pricing. While the long range tracking forecast it around $3 million, it was headed past $6 million.

I guess I am not the only one who has trouble gauging the horror genre during the holiday season.

The film did not sag at all come the Sunday estimates, were its earnings per film buck was double Widows. So unless you had multiple screens of Hannah Grace you were not going to do very well on the final week. The scores for the week ended up like this:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $89,976,297

Ben’s X-Wing Express – $83,985,996

Goat Water Picture Palace – $81,370,880

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $79,691,857

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $56,857,828

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – $56,389,016

Joanie’s Joint – $55,913,962

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $55,497,987

Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $55,497,987

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $55,437,311

I HAS BAD TASTE – $55,097,185

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $55,029,759

Too Orangey For Crows – $54,645,486

grannanj’s Cineplex – $54,536,607

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $54,536,607

Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $54,142,730

Corr, Ben, Goat and SynCaine all bet on Hannah Grace. Corr even got the perfect pick, which was 1x The Grinch, 1x Creed II, and 6x Hannah Grace.

Between them and the rest of the pack was more than a $20 million gap. The gap between the top and bottom of the remaining twelve people who played… full score list here on the final week… was less than $3 million. A tight race amongst those who eschewed Hannah Grace.

That left the overall scores for the season looking like this:

Goat Water Picture Palace – $1,002,236,972

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $994,216,623

Ben’s X-Wing Express – $970,491,788

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – $969,867,323

Too Orangey For Crows – $949,946,148

I HAS BAD TASTE – $939,059,282

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $920,250,209

grannanj’s Cineplex – $915,931,935

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $900,117,327

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $899,596,418

Joanie’s Joint – $871,223,508

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $857,227,598

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $819,287,831

Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $792,913,965

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $782,972,039

Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $559,786,290

Goat going with Hannah Grace was enough for them to hold onto first place. Corr’s perfect pick jumped him over me and into second place by a fair margin. The surprise was Ben, who was off to a slow start the season, but who rallied in the last few weeks and managed to push me into fourth place by a little more that $600K.

And on the alternate scoring front, Corr managed to elude the one scenario that would deny him first place.

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – 81

Goat Water Picture Palace – 69

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – 62

Ben’s X-Wing Express – 58

Too Orangey For Crows – 57

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 48

I HAS BAD TASTE – 47

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – 43

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – 42

grannanj’s Cineplex – 38

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 38

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 38

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – 34

Joanie’s Joint – 28

Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – 17

Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 15

Corr took first and Goat second, with me in third. Ben continued his climb up the list, but I was able to hold him off here, so he ended up in fourth place.

As for scoring this, everybody managed to make it into the top ten at least three times. Only Corr managed to make it there every week of the season. While the end ranking wasn’t radically different that the traditional cumulative scores, it was different. It could also be much more volatile from week to week. However, no scoring system that accumulates over thirteen weeks is going to let you “catch up” at the end, so the top three were near the top during the latter half of the season.

Congrats to Goat and Corr, winners of the two different scoring systems.

Here is where usually write about what films are coming up this week. However, as I noted last week, I am taking a break from this until the summer blockbuster season rolls around again. Still, I am half tempted just to do a “what’s new at the movies” post every Wednesday. After a year and a half of posts just about every week about FML, movies on Wednesday is almost a thing.

Unfortunately, nothing big is hitting this week for FML. In fact, there isn’t much compelling coming up for the whole Winter season. At least not for me. My wife is excited for Mary Poppins Returns, the original being one of her favorite movies from childhood. But when Mary Poppins comes up I start in with whether or not anybody would know who Julie Andrews even was if she hadn’t done Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music so early in her career.

Anyway, as I said, the league will stay up. If you have your own league you want me to join I’m game. I’ll be back some the summer with more FML posts. I do wonder what I will post on Wednesday now.